slaguru666andClaude Opus 5
e5dc9b5299
Option H, measured before it was built. Losing a wing already mattered
once it happened — a grounded supporter was 40.5% to be killed against
9.3% for one still flying, a swing of thirty points. It almost never
happened: the wings carried the creature's own six points of heraldic
hide, so folding one meant beating armour six eight times over, and it
occurred in 9% of fights. The rule was reachable, not weak, and every
option that made grounding HURT more moved the win rate by under five
points because you cannot spend a state you never reach.
So the lever is the wing, not the consequence. A location may now be
`bare`: worn armour still covers it — barding a wing works exactly as
before — but the animal's own hide stops at the edge of the membrane.
The supporter's wings are bare, and it gets the toughness back where a
six-hundred-year-old record should carry it: hide 6 -> 7, CON 20 -> 36,
so 22 hit points become 30. STR and SIZ are untouched, so the damage
modifier stays +2d6.
Measured over 20,000 fights against the same four agents:
grounded on borough off borough
before 9% 12.5% win 85.6% win / 14.4% wiped
after 67% 22.1% win 83.5% win / 16.5% wiped
The wing shot becomes the play. Fighting it on borough ground stays a
losing proposition, so ARGENT AND GULES is still the real answer and
grounding improves a bad fight rather than replacing the solution — and
the fight off borough ground keeps its teeth, marginally more lethal
than before rather than less. Bare wings ALONE was the trap: it made
grounding routine and turned the off-ground fight into a 96% walkover
with a 3.8% wipe rate, buying the text at the cost of the encounter.
check-anatomy gains the property this whole thread was about: a plan
whose behaviour turns on losing a wing must not armour that wing with
the creature's own hide, or the rule is decoration. Negative-tested by
putting the hide back.
Also re-records the lethality baseline, which was ALREADY stale: HEAD's
own code reproduced 27 of its 47 entries differently, because the
supporter joined NPCS in ddc4f99 and shifted the shared random stream
for every creature measured after it. Every drift sat under the guard's
six-point tolerance, so it passed while being wrong. Worth knowing that
the file's claim — "the only thing that can move the number is a change
to the rules or to the creature" — is not currently true: adding any
creature perturbs the rest. Seeding per creature would fix it and is
not done here.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
73 KiB
73 KiB